Martin Van Buren Read online

  But even with all the hindsight that history can confer, it is unclear how exactly Van Buren wrought this great change. We know that he did it between about 1826 and 1828, and that Jackson’s election in the latter year marks the beginning of what we now see as an important new epoch, one of those curious moments when the wind shifts and a new phase of human behavior begins. But it is no less evident that for all of Andrew Jackson’s great charisma, Van Buren was a far deeper theorist on party issues and his vision was indispensable to the rise of the phenomenon we call Jacksonian Democracy.

  How did Van Buren do it? Even at the time, contemporaries complained about what is now the historian’s dilemma—that no one knows exactly what he was up to as he built his new party. But a thousand cat-steps brought him invisibly toward his destination. It was not always easy to see the traces, but year after year the structure rose, like a great Mayan temple, its progress slow if measured by days but irrefutable at the end of a decade.

  Much of his progress was instinctive. If nothing else, Van Buren was a social creature. A widower, blond and charming, in control of thirty-six electoral votes, he was bound to be popular in the Washington scene. The Democratic Party may have begun, in fact, as a party—or at least an extension of the idea that like-minded people enjoy being together. From the moment of his arrival he was in the thick of it, playing cards with Calhoun’s friends, talking horses with John Randolph of Roanoke, visiting congressmen and senators at their country seats, and loving every minute of his relevance. Even opponents paid tribute to his charm, saying that he was “a host in himself, the idol and pride of his party.” He often retired to Saratoga during the racing season, and here the socializing continued, with Southern and Western allies coming great distances to confer with the great strategist. Pleasure and politics coincided nicely, and it is clear that part of Van Buren’s success at building a national organization lay in his ability to entertain well. The Democratic Party has always been a movable feast.

  In particular, Van Buren liked the ladies of Washington, flattering and cajoling them, gossiping about their husbands with them, making them laugh. He probably destroyed an extensive correspondence with his female confidantes (what is left is perfectly fine, but terribly official). One especially caught his eye—Ellen Randolph, the granddaughter of his hero Thomas Jefferson. The gossips had a field day when Ellen, by then a frequent consort, asked the band at a ball to play her favorite song—”The Yellow-Haired Laddie.” Still, there is no evidence that Van Buren ever committed any indiscretions during his long career at the center of Washington society—he managed to combine perfectly the seeming capacity for sin with the refusal to commit it (a rare feat indeed).

  As might be expected, these characteristics endeared him to the Southern politicians in Washington. Van Buren was a peculiar sort of Northerner—he was fun—and he would share a special rapport with the South throughout his career. He instinctively gravitated toward “bold” politicians of the “old school”—the original followers of Jefferson, now aging but still full of vinegar, and as alienated from Monroe as he. Van Buren took care to state his fidelity to the creed—government should be modest, banks in particular should be constrained, and internal improvements should be local and limited. The Supreme Court should be knocked back down to size, and anything else that was not spelled out by the Constitution should be prohibited. Soon, a host of influential Southerners—Nathaniel Macon, John Taylor, William Crawford, among others—were paying attention to the diminutive New Yorker.

  To cultivate these friendships and advance the simultaneous goal of building the party through an expanding network of allies, Van Buren took frequent long trips into the Southland. It was the age of the tour—Lafayette’s long pilgrimage across America had electrified the people in 1824–25—and Van Buren grasped sooner than most that traveling was another form of politicking. His journeys, early versions of the barnstorming tour, were deeply mysterious to the oracles of Washington, who could never quite determine what Van Buren was up to. According to one correspondent, opinion was divided as to whether he had traveled because of “a great plot to revive the republican party,” or because of “a beautiful & accomplished lady, not distantly related to the Governor of Virginia, and that an alliance of portentous consequences was then to be formed between ‘the ancient dominion’ and this ‘great state.’”

  One of the most important friendships he made was with Thomas Ritchie, a leading editor and political thinker who had much of Virginia wrapped around his finger and ran the Richmond Junto the same way that Van Buren ran the Albany Regency. They met in the spring of 1823, and something clicked (fifteen years later, Ritchie wrote that from “the first moment of my acquaintance with you, I have been your personal & political friend.”). As usual, Calhoun was one of the first to notice that the air had shifted: “Between the Regency at Albany and the junto at Richmond, there is a vital connection. They give and receive help from each other, and confidently expect to govern this nation.” With the revival of the New York–Virginia alliance that had propelled Jefferson and Burr to power, and before that Washington and Hamilton, could anything stop them?

  A year later Van Buren paid the most important visit of all: to the Sage of Monticello himself, the original partisan leader, still alive nearly fifty years after setting events in motion with the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson received him for several days in May 1824, and to Van Buren it was nothing less than a laying on of hands. Decades later, re-creating the event in his memoirs, the years melted away and he was with Jefferson again: “It may well be imagined with how much satisfaction I listened to Mr. Jefferson’s conversation. His imposing appearance as he sat uncovered—never wearing his hat except when he left the carriage and often not then—and the earnest and impressive manner in which he spoke of men and things, are yet as fresh in my recollection as if they were experiences of yesterday.” Van Buren left Monticello with a renewed sense of purpose, having found his “beau ideal.” Jefferson confirmed his sense that Monroe was an apostate Jeffersonian (in a letter to Van Buren, he wrote, “Tories are Tories still, by whatever name they be called.”). Van Buren wrote back to Jefferson, immodestly, that he hoped to personally rescue Jefferson’s country “from misrule.”

  Washington society grew apprehensive at the news of this May-December frolic. An informant to Andrew Jackson, with whom Van Buren was not yet allied, wrote the general, “It seems that Mr. Van Buren, not content with the exercise of his talents for intrigue in his own state, must try his powers with the ancient Dominion.” John Quincy Adams noted in his diary that Van Buren resembled Jefferson in “profound dissimulation and duplicity,” but that he also reminded him of James Madison for his discretion and disinclination for open conflict. In fact, Van Buren would soon launch a correspondence with Madison as well. He made a surprising prilgrimage to Quincy, Massachusetts, to visit an ancient John Adams. The old masters were still alive; why not take their pulse now and then?

  That same year, 1824, presented an important chance to develop these embryonic thoughts into a concrete course of action. Monroe was finally leaving office, and the presidency was up for grabs among an unusually large number of strong contenders, including Calhoun, Clay, Adams, Jackson, and Georgia’s William H. Crawford, the crusty old Treasury secretary. Thanks to Monroe’s vague policy of “fusion,” there was no clear consensus, and an unusually bitter election followed. Van Buren felt his way forward in this complicated situation, and eventually settled on Crawford as the truest “democrat,” to use the word that was beginning to see the light of day more and more frequently (it had a pejorative taint during the excesses of the French Revolution, but that was now ancient history). Despite their friendship, he was distressed by Calhoun’s disdain for the caucus, which Van Buren considered the linchpin of the republican tradition, a crucial instrument for creating party policy and disciplining wafflers. The long schism between Calhoun and Van Buren, on and off again for so many years, probably originated in this mino
r dispute. Amazingly, given later events, Calhoun criticized Van Buren in 1823 for a dangerous radicalism that gave too much emphasis to states’ rights.

  In February 1824, Van Buren convened just such a caucus to coax his selection forward and verify that the party would go along—even though in this case “the party” barely existed. At a rump meeting, a caucus of congressmen and senators confirmed the selection of Crawford. In many ways, the nomination was more important than the nominee, because it signaled an emerging coalition of Northerners and Southerners, opposed to the quasi-Federalism of the administration and guided by Van Buren and Thomas Ritchie, pulling levers in the nation’s two most important states.

  That does not mean there were not big challenges to the Crawford team. An impressive setback occurred even before the nomination, when Crawford suffered a paralytic stroke that left him largely unable to speak, see, or move (a perfect candidate for a kingmaker like Van Buren). He recovered to an extent, but not sufficiently to run or serve, and the fact that Van Buren pushed the doomed campaign as far as he did does not reflect especially well on his record. In fact, Crawford was likely the sickest man ever to run for president, more infirm than Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.

  Van Buren also had other problems on his plate, especially back home in New York, where the Regency was not running itself as well as usual. Some of it was his fault. To strengthen Crawford’s chances, he decided that it was necessary for the Regency to reject a popular drive to vote directly for presidential electors—a miscalculation that flew in the face of his general sympathy for extending the suffrage and hurt his party in New York.

  To make matters worse, an underling had stupidly removed De Witt Clinton from the board that oversaw the Erie Canal, a move that backfired and aroused public sympathy for Clinton, resulting in Clinton’s reelection as governor (Van Buren exploded, “There is such a thing in politics as killing a man too dead!”). After hearing the results from New York (“a tornado”), he complained that he was “as completely broken down a politician as my bitterest enemies could desire.”

  The results in Washington were just as depressing. Despite a long, drawn-out process of choosing the next president, which he thought he could influence at several crucial stages in Congress, the House of Representatives ultimately awarded the 1824 election to John Quincy Adams, thanks to some adroit politicking by Henry Clay. One of Adams’s supporters exulted that Van Buren looked like “a wilted cabbage” after getting the news. He had backed the wrong man, had stuck with him for far too long, and had lost further prestige by failing to stop the election of Adams in Congress.

  But Van Buren could not stay down for long, not as long as his fortunes were tied to New York’s. In all of American history, it would be hard to find a state that rose more rapidly than New York in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The Erie Canal was completed in 1825, but even before, there was rapidly mounting evidence of New York’s extraordinary growth. In 1790, Virginia was the most populous state by far, with 692,000 people, twice as many as New York; by 1820, New York was first, with over a million. In 1825, New York’s customs receipts constituted almost $16 million toward the national figure of $27 million. Virginia, at the same time, was losing wealth precipitously; between 1817 and 1829 its land values dropped from $206 million to $96 million. It seemed time to recalibrate the political value of the two states as well. One of Van Buren’s lieutenants wrote, “My only solicitude is that these consummate braggadocios from Virginia may be put down.” Van Buren may have liked the South, but there is no doubt that he, too, sought a greater influence for the Empire State.

  Despite the catastrophe of the Crawford candidacy, the pieces were in place for another, far better organized effort in 1828. To restore his damaged credibility, Van Buren had to begin by mending fences at home. That meant a rapprochement with his old adversary De Witt Clinton. They agreed to make life a little more tolerable for each other, and Van Buren bought himself a little time to plan his next moves. Jabez Hammond, the chronicler of New York politics, called their dalliance a “backstairs intercourse,” and what that phrase lacks in poetry it makes up for in vividness. Without Clinton dogging him every step of the way, Van Buren’s reelection to the Senate in 1827 was easier. Their détente also facilitated a new chess move of the highest importance: the gradual alignment of the proto-party Van Buren had formed in 1824 behind the most attractive candidate of them all, Andrew Jackson. Clinton’s early support for Jackson had delayed Van Buren’s embrace of Old Hickory, along with some concern over Jackson’s willingness to embrace pure Jeffersonian ideals. But now all that changed, and Jackson’s group of friends converged with the impressive organization Van Buren had built. With a worthy actor enlisted for the starring role, Van Buren agreed to direct, produce, and even build the stage.

  In one specific sense, the disaster of 1824 brought a great gift to Van Buren. He could hardly have asked for a president who more eerily conjured the ghosts of Federalism than John Quincy Adams, who not only resembled his father physically, but retained his choleric intolerance for the little gestures that oil the machine works of American politics. For all his remarkable talents, Adams was in many ways a maladroit politician, and his heavy-handed nationalism fit perfectly into Van Buren’s plans to define a new and pure Republicanism. The so-called corrupt bargain, by which Clay engineered Adams’s election in the House in return for a high position (secretary of state), inflamed further opposition, and the Virginia firebrand John Randolph excoriated “the puritan and the blackleg” for their marriage of convenience. Adams’s patronage policies exacerbated the prevailing distrust in the air, for he hired former Federalists along with Republicans (Van Buren complained that Adams did not care if his support came from “Jew or Gentile”). What had been a vague restlessness under Monroe now burst forth as a full-fledged opposition party, with Van Buren calling the shots.

  Some of these developments took place in the public eye, in the halls of Congress, where Van Buren and his friends began to oppose the policies of the Adams administration. Many of these policies seem quite reasonable in hindsight (a diplomatic mission to a pan-American Congress in Panama, federal support for national education, expanded internal improvements), but they exacerbated the prevailing sense that crypto-Federalists had seized control of the government, and they fed the voracious creature Van Buren was raising.

  But as usual, many of Van Buren’s best moves took place far from the public eye. Like a nineteenth-century Vito Corleone, he was always thinking ahead of his enemies, forging a new network of families and alliances that would forever redraw the map of power in the United States. Everything he did contributed to the goal of unfurling a new national party, nominally Jeffersonian but now hitched to the rising star of Andrew Jackson. On vacation in Saratoga in the summer of 1826, he entertained visitors from the North, South, and West, and fine-tuned the plan. Young Charles Francis Adams, the president’s puritanical son, denounced Saratoga as a place devoted only to pleasure, with “riding, singing, drinking, dancing … the constant order of the day and night.” It was exactly the kind of place where Van Buren did his best work, and here he began to cobble together the disparate subparties of Jackson, Calhoun, and Crawford. He also continued his mysterious journeys deep into the heartland to forge strategic friendships. He scored a coup over the Christmas holidays in 1826 when he traveled to South Carolina and secured Calhoun’s acquiescence (this despite the fact that Calhoun was Adams’s vice president). He and Calhoun had already arranged for a new opposition newspaper in Washington, and when the Senate steered its lucrative printing jobs toward this paper, no one needed to ask who was behind it. Van Buren also found other regional power brokers besides Thomas Ritchie, including Isaac Hill of New Hampshire, Amos Kendall and Francis Blair of Kentucky, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, and the clique of Jackson supporters around Nashville. A national network of politicians and journalists acting in concert, vastly larger and more modern than Jefferson’s
Republican Party, was ready to unleash its energies.

  * * *

  Van Buren usually covered his tracks well, but fortunately we have one piece of vivid evidence that testifies to Van Buren’s role in these seismic events. On January 13, 1827, Van Buren wrote a letter to Thomas Ritchie that outlined his grandiose hopes for the organization they were building. He began by describing the desirability of a national convention to present their candidate to the world, which would in turn lead to “the substantial reorganization of the Old Republican Party.” The new organization, “the democracy,” would “draw anew the old Party lines” and bring better organization to the sloppy system of presidential nomination, which revolved too much around personalities and not enough around principles (the same argument he had made against De Witt Clinton). He added a point that the Virginian could not have failed to appreciate: the creation of national parties would soften sectional tension over slavery.

  In other words, Van Buren was making an offer that Ritchie could not refuse: if Virginia would yoke itself to New York in a new system, they would prevail against all opponents, and avoid the far worse specter of Virginia’s growing economic and political irrelevance. Without saying it, Van Buren was implying that Virginia would be the junior partner and that the Virginia dynasty was now a thing of the past, but that Virginia would be protected by a senior partner that kept the slavery issue from getting out of hand. With the right candidate now on board, there was little they could not do. Van Buren understood that he was ushering in a new era: “the effect of such a nomination of Gen’l Jackson could not fail to be considerable. His election, as the result of his military services without reference to party & so far as he alone is concerned, scarcely to principle, would be one thing. His election as the result of a combined and concerted effort of a political party, holding in the main to certain tenets & opposed to certain prevailing principles, might be another and a far different thing.” Three months later, Ritchie accepted the proposal. The different thing, the Democracy, was born.